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Folk singer Rodriguez, whose late-career resurgence was captured in the Oscar-winning documentary Searching for Sugar Man in 2012, has died.
Sixto Diaz Rodriguez played in Detroit bars from the late sixties, but failed to find any success. He wrote protest songs marked by stark imagery reflecting urban life of the time.
His first album, ‘Cold Fact’, received favourable reviews but went unnoticed by the public. The same was true of his second album, ‘Coming From Reality’.
Jim Knippenberg of The Cincinnati Enquirer compared him to Dylan, but thought him to be ‘much more explicit’.
While both his albums went unnoticed in America, his music found an audience in Australia, where he toured in 1979 and 1981, and especially in South Africa, where his message resonated with a largely young white audience that was increasingly uncomfortable with apartheid and the rigidly conservative prevailing culture of the time.
Cape Town record-shop owner Stephen Segerman said that in the mid-’70s, most white, liberal households owned albums such as ‘Abbey Road’ (The Beatles), ’Bridge Over Troubled Water’ (Simon & Garfunkel ) and ’Cold Fact’.
‘To us, it was one of the most famous records of all time. The message it had was, “Be anti-establishment”.’
In the mid-1990s, Segerman and journalist Craig Bartholomew-Strydom searched for and eventually found Rodriguez in Detroit.
A 1998 tour of South Africa followed, with six sold-out shows at 5 000-seat arenas. ‘It was strange seeing all those bright white faces, all of them knowing every word to every one of my songs,’ he told The Sunday Telegraph in 2009.
After this he played in England and Sweden. In the US, ‘Cold Fact’ (2008) and ‘Coming From Reality’ (2009) were re-released.
He also played at the Hamptons International Film Festival, and did more tours.
Rodriguez told The Sunday Telegraph: ‘My story isn’t a rags-to-riches story. It’s rags to rags, and I’m glad about that. Where other people live in an artificial world, I feel I live in the real world. And nothing beats reality.’
Rodriguez dies at 81 – Daily Friend
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